Because of digital compression technology, more television channels are transmitted over the same analog spectrum, and there are more channels for viewers to watch. Digitally compressed video and audio signals are binary data streams that can be transmitted, stored and played out as computer data files or streams. Therefore, digital video/audio data are typically handled in digital forms during production, transmission and storage phases.
Organizing digital video content is becoming a major challenge for all content owners, video and broadband internet service providers, and even home users. This is because, unlike text, video content cannot be searched and identified easily by computers. Unlike audio, video content data has far larger data size. In addition, it is very difficult and inefficient to identify video content by human visual inspections since the process is very time-consuming and expensive. These factors makes it difficult to effectively organize, archive, and search video content. However, the need for searching and identifying video content is increasingly important with applications in video surveillance, copyright content monitoring, television commercials monitoring, intelligent video advertising, and government regulatory television programming monitoring.
Therefore, there is a need to identify motion video content efficiently and automatically, and with minimal or no human interactions.
There is also a need to identify motion video content without having access to the full resolution digitized video content data.
There is also a need to identify motion video content at the possible highest speed with minimal storage capacity required and possible minimal data transfer bandwidth.
There is a need to provide a method for facilitating the archiving and search of video content without a huge storage capacity required, and to be able to search the information easily at low hardware cost. There is also a need to collect statistics and extraction additional information from the archived video information automatically.